Playwright
Born: July 4, 1927;
Died: August 26, 2018

NEIL Simon, who has died aged 91, was the world’s top comedy playwright. And no one in the history of theatre has made more people laugh over such a career span.

The man who created 30-odd classic plays such as The Odd Couple and The Goodbye Girl managed to combine humour with an acute insight into the human condition that is unequalled.
In Simon’s plays, which often morphed into movies, he revealed much of his own life and relationship details. His first play, Come Blow Your Horn, was about two brothers trying to work out what to do with their lives. Barefoot In The Park featured the early days of his marriage to wife Joan. The Odd Couple was based on his brother Danny and friend Roy’s incongruous relationship.
Indeed, such was Neil Simon’s inability to not write about his life, his second wife Marsh Mason noted that during one domestic moment, she was entirely aware her words of anger would at one point be replicated in play form.

Mason was on the money. The to-and-fro of their debate would appear almost word for word in The Goodbye Girl.
Neil Simon was, it seems, born to write. Growing up in the Bronx, his salesman father left the family home and his two sons with a determination to forge their own futures. The Simon brothers wrote as a pair, and school sketches evolved into working the kids’ summer camps, where Neil met his future wife, Joan. The Simon brothers progressed to writing gags for television, working for Jerry Lewis, Phil Silvers and Sid Caesar.
However, Neil Simon had dreamed of becoming a playwright, and such was his determination to succeed, his very first effort, Come Blow Your Horn, took a year to write and two and a half years to rewrite, finally emerging, after 22 drafts, as an entirely different entity from which it began.
Simon’s resolve was sorely tested when just a few weeks into its Broadway run, the play was about to be pulled, but two incredible reviews by Noel Coward and Groucho Marx produced box office queues around the block.
Thankfully, his second effort took much less time and wasn't luck reliant. Barefoot In The Park was a smash hit, and Hollywood knew Simon was a bankable star.
However, he never seemed calmed by success. In fact, the more hit plays he wrote the more pressure Simon felt. But this sensitivity was no doubt a major factor in accessing the depths he needed to produce winners.

It’s no surprise to read in the two volumes of his memoirs that he suffered from depression, that he was continually trying to access happiness.
Neil Simon found it episodically. He was madly in love with Joan whom he’d met during the summer camp years, but in 1971, he discovered she had terminal cancer. His two daughters, and work, were to be his saviour. “I picked up my script of the Sunshine Boys and let it swallow up all my other thoughts,” he wrote.
Simon found love again, with actress Marsha Mason. And he was to marry five times in his life, twice to the same woman. The man was a searcher.
There is much to be learned of Neil Simon from his plays. Biloxi Blues told of his army days, Brighton Beach Memoirs of his Jewish family, but his two autobiographies reveal a real depth of emotional intelligence, combined with some sublime anecdotes.

With exposition almost hidden, he weaves in tales of how Jerry Lewis gave him clothes as presents; sweater, socks etc, all in red. The comedy writer reveals how he hates jokes.

And he  tells of meeting Sean Connery one day at the then James Bond’s rented apartment, with a view to playing golf. Connery forgot his car keys, locked himself out of the apartment and so climbed along the tiny ledge four floors up and in through a window. “I was watching James Bond,” wrote the playwright.
Simon had his critics however. Some argued his plays were too low-brow, full of one-liners, too comedic. So he sat down and wrote the brilliant drama-tragedy Lost In Yonkers - and picked up a Pulitzer Prize, to add to his clutch of Tony Awards. And he proved he could write for women, and gay men as evidenced in The Gingerbread Lady.
Yet, while Simon could understand human emotions and had a brilliant mind for turning the clever, snappy phrase, he was clueless when it came to money.
Hollwyood agent Swifty Lazar once called Simon and said if he could get the writer $300,000 from Paramount for Barefoot, would he accept it? Simon said yes, discovering later Lazar had sold the script for $400,000.
Simon once lost all his money when the Wyoming livestock he invested in all froze to death. And he lost millions to Hollywood when he signed over the TV and film rights to The Odd Couple for a measly $100k. He gave up the rights to Barefoot “and lost a fortune.”
But it didn’t matter. Simon went back to his typewriter because he felt compelled to write. He said the writer part of him controlled the non-writer, dragging him to the typewriter to the point where he struggled to return to the real world. “The irony is the new boy is a fake, a fraud,” he said of the successful Neil Simon. “But who’s to expose him? Certainly not his former self because he needs the new one now.”
Was Simon a little self-obsessed? Marsha Mason described Simon as a “needy person.” He didn’t deny the implied criticism. “I needed to hear the footsteps of friends and family. I needed humanity at my beck and call. On the other hand, I do spend the greater part of my everyday life completely alone, sitting over a typewriter.”
Which is where he transferred the dark experiences of life into play form. “The problems we cause ourselves are not necessarily a laughing matter, but when I put it down on paper and get it right and make the stage a mirror of our own responses, more often than not the audiences seem to laugh at themselves.”
He was right. Neil Simon proved to be the master of relationship writing, with huge injections of the cleverest, most consistent comedy. And more of his plays were adapted to screen than any other playwright. He beat Shakespeare hands down.
And if there’s a happy ending to the life of Neil Simon, it’s his incredible legacy.
Simon was married five times, twice to the same woman. He is survived by his fourth wife, actress Elaine Joyce; two daughters, Ellen and Nancy; three grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

BRIAN BEACOM